Learning from Reactions: Developing Social Calibration

Paying attention to others and measuring and analyzing how they react to you is a dangerous game. It can lead to all sorts of bad things – “analysis paralysis”, too much of a focus on reactions and too little of one on results, and attention-seeking and reaction-grabbing behavior to the extreme.

And yet, monitoring and learning from reactions is an utterly vital habit to get into. Without reaction analysis, most folks are doomed to low levels of social calibration for life.

Studying Reactions

Most women grow up very closely monitoring and studying the reactions of everyone around them, and stressing over them. They beat themselves up over minor social faux pas, and fret over the smallest social detail. Some men do this too as boys – but many don’t.

One of the ways that life is unfair is that the earlier you start doing something, the easier a time you’ll have mastering it and the higher your theoretical “ceiling” for learning that skill is. The unfair part is that no one tells you when you’re young what the most important things to start mastering early are; if they did, social calibration would be one of them. Most women edge most men in having an easier time mastering social calibration, and have a higher possible “ceiling” for how socially adept life is, because they start paying attention to subtle social details a lot earlier.

But, as a man you can catch up! That’s because men tend to logically apply themselves and consciously figure out underlying rules and modify their behavior in ways that women quite often don’t… if they focus on something. The only reason most men come up far short when measured against women on social calibration and social intuition is that they simply haven’t applied themselves the way women have.

So how do you develop social calibration and a sharp social intuition? Focused practice, reaction analysis, repetition, and experimentation. You must train yourself to be attuned to how others reaction around you – and you must get good at analyzing those reactions.

The Wrong Way to Study Reactions

When I moved from sixth grade to seventh grade, something changed. For some reason I couldn’t explain at the time, my classmates shifted from viewing me as the biggest outsider in school, a man apart with utterly no friends, to suddenly treating me like some kind of celebrity. The coolest kids started coming up to talk to me, and asking me to hang out with them and go to their parties. The prettiest, most popular girls in school would flirt with me and ask me on dates – even the girls in the grade above me, something that just didn’t happen. An eighth grade girl would never ask out a seventh grade boy – especially not the prettiest, most popular eighth grade girls in school. But they asked me out.

I know now, and I began to suspect at the time, that it was a combination of my defiant separateness – I refused to join sides with anyone – my intellect on display in the classroom – where I was generally the fastest, most thorough learner out of all my classmates and a consistent participant – and traits I possessed that made me “cool”: moving slowly, speaking slowly, using eye contact strongly, ending conversations first, being the one who walked away, not waiting for others’ reactions. These things made me a compelling figure to those around me.

Yet, after that first taste of popularity, I became addicted, and I needed more. But, with a social fear that prevented me from accepting the invitations of the cool kids and the popular girls, I had to get attention in a way that didn’t involve actually making friends.

Learning to draw people in then was hell. I found myself putting immense pressure on myself to always be a star; and I paid incredibly close and detailed attention to the reactions of others, beating myself up over bad reactions and focusing intently on how to get good ones.

I’m quite glad for it today; because of it, I have an extraordinarily attuned social intuition. But I don’t recommend this approach at all. You can’t make focusing on reactions your top priority – here’s why:

• You become oversensitive to rejection. When your top priority becomes getting good reactions, any perceived rejection seems a huge defeat. As a result, you become very conservative in your actions and highly risk avoidant – something that will stifle your progress in meeting women. You need to think in numbers when it comes to approaching girls, and risk-avoidance will kill your ability to do that.

• You devote too much mental energy to details. While I wish I could prescribe adopting a laser focus on the details of reactions to every man to really develop a strong social intuition, in reality it’s quite impractical. The amount of time and obsessing it takes to really hone one’s social calibration to the level women possess and beyond is stultifying; it’s far better for you to focus on moving faster with women and persisting with women than it is to focus on why she said X or what Y facial expression means is going through her head.

• You miss the big picture. What’s seduction all about? Getting a woman to like you as much as possible… or getting her to become intimate with you? Fact is, the men women like the most are also the men women are most careful not to mess things up around, and the ones they want to take things very slowly with to avoid losing. Which means, oftentimes, they won’t sleep with men they like too much too soon, and if it doesn’t happen quickly, it often simply won’t happen at all.
  
  You don’t need a woman to think you’re the most amazing man on Earth. You just need her to like you enough to want to get intimate with you; the rest (dating, relationships, etc.) you can build from there.

Studying and learning from reactions is good; but you can’t make it your sole driving focus, as I did back in high school and junior high. It’s crippling for the soul; and rather than focusing on moving things forward and getting results, all you end up doing is a small test here and a small test there and passively studying how people react to you.

If you’re trying to get good with women in a hurry, small steps tests and half measures are not enough.

The Right Way to Study Reactions

What I recommend men do these days to best learn from reactions and develop social calibration are as follows:

• Build synergy by meeting women in a range of circumstances. Most men focus on meeting women in one kind of venue – nightclubs, dive bars, coffee shops, or parties and social circle, for instance. The problem is, women all act and react a little differently in different situations, and you’ll get different reactions to different things in different situations. If you’re meeting women across a range of circumstances, however, you’ll be exposed to, and forced to adapt to, all these different varieties of reactions, and the more you see, the more your general social calibration improves – and general social calibration is the type of social calibration most men are badly in need of; it’s that underlying sense of what to do in any situation with any reaction. Ultimately, getting good at meeting women at nightclubs, coffee shops, and parties will make you better at meeting women at parties than if you focused on just parties alone.

• Get diverse friends. Diverse in every way: background, socioeconomic status and class, nationality, ethnicity, personality. Get some passionate friends and some blasé ones. Get some rich friends and some poverty-line friends. Get some friends who are models, some who are construction workers, some who are writers, and some who are MDs. By exposing yourself to a large swatch of different kinds of people and forcing yourself to learn to interact with all of them, you will develop a far broader and more comprehensive social intuition than if you spent time principally associating with only one kind of person.

• Push for results. By focusing on results rather than just reactions, you’ll develop social calibration and build a social intuition far more quickly and more efficiently than I did back in high school. When your sole focus is reactions, you can only guess at what an individual reaction really means; when you push for results – when you ask women to sit with you, give you investment, open up to you, go home with you, get intimate with you – only then do you really know where they stand. Some women whom you might think are reacting very well might never go home with you; some who don’t seem to be reacting well at all will accompany you home and get intimate with you if you only ask. The best way to find out what reactions really mean is to push for results.

This studying of reactions from a variety of women in a variety of situations, of having friends you get to know and interact with with a variety of backgrounds, and of pushing for results rather than stopping at only studying the reactions themselves without tying those reactions to outcomes, will accelerate your growth and learning a thousandfold. You’ll be able to develop a strong social intuition and finely tuned social calibration at a rapid clip, and your development ceiling will be much higher than that of those who interact with only a limited variety of people in a limited variety of circumstances.

By having both breadth and depth in your scope of learning social calibration, you enable yourself to learn quickly and deeply.

Social calibration is one of those things you are only sort of vaguely aware you could use more of when you don’t have it. If you’re lacking, you won’t notice much of the things you’re doing wrong; but as you develop it, the clouds start receding from the sky, and all seems far more transparent in the world. Your theory of mind starts clicking; you know what other people are thinking, and can address women’s fears and concerns before they even think to voice them. You know exactly what to say and do to best excite and intrigue that new girl you met; and you know, of course, how to be “cool”.

It’s one of the most critical, vital, essential things that you learn. So if you aren’t working on developing social calibration right now, and you aren’t learning at all from reactions… well… what are you waiting for?

Yours,
Chase Amante